Comment by neya
4 days ago
OpenAI is already building complex user models. And I mean, super detailed user models - where you are from, what you do, what are your most vulnerable weaknesses, what you care about the most and everything else. This is information even the world's largest advertising company would struggle to put together across their fragmented eco-system (Gmail, Search, etc), but OpenAI has all this on a silver platter. And that scares me, because, a lot of people use ChatGPT as a therapist. We know this because of their advertising intent which they've explicitly expressed. Advertising requires good user models to work (so advertisers can efficiently target their audience) and it is the only way to prove ROI to the advertisers. "But, OpenAI said they won't do targeted ads..". Remember, Google said "Don't be evil" once upon a time too..
That's ok, we use ChatGPT only for coding. We should be good, right? Umm, no. They already explicitly expressed the intention to take a percentage of your revenue if you shipped something with ChatGPT, so even the tech guys aren't safe.
"As intelligence moves into scientific research, drug discovery, energy systems, and financial modeling, new economic models will emerge. Licensing, IP-based agreements, and outcome-based pricing will share in the value created. That is how the internet evolved. Intelligence will follow the same path."
"Intelligence will follow the same path."
https://openai.com/index/a-business-that-scales-with-the-val...
So yes, OpenAI has the best chance to win on the consumer side than anyone else. But, that's not necessarily a good thing (and the OpenAI fanboys will hate me for pointing this out).
> They already explicitly expressed the intention to take a percentage of your revenue if you shipped something with ChatGPT, so even the tech guys aren't safe.
Wasn't there already a ruling that LLM output is not protected by copyright?
I hope that's the case. That would be really confidence inspiring.
> Advertising requires good user models to work…
…and yet, everywhere I go I see massive advertisements on billboards, the sides of buildings, public transit, movie screens…
Yes, but still, targeting is done even in billboards based on the location's demographics based on census data. It's not random. Some countries in Asia (like Singapore, Malaysia) have digital bill boards to target certain demographics based on the time of the day or the estimated crowd demographic at a given bus stop. And a few of them even track eyeballs to count "views" of the ad.
I admit this is a factor I hadn't much considered. I'm sure at some point, if not already, the data collected by your phone will enable the equivalent of a tracking pixel on your physical location, so you can get personalized ads when you step into the subway car: the system will quickly evaluate which rider is most likely to spend money based on ads, and on what, and then an auction will be run in two nanoseconds and the winner will show their 10-second transit clip. Oof.
The saddest part is, the old kind of advertising worked just fine, before all the companies got addicted to AdCrack.
1 reply →